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- [00:01]
Julian Walker
Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair.
- [00:18]
Matthew Rimsky
It's done.
- [00:19]
Julian Walker
The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, Give it a whirl. Love ya. So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up Fees may apply Support comes from Wise the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. Fed up with losing out to hidden fees? When you send money abroad with your everyday bank, choose the smart way Wise. You can count on the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google. No unwelcome surprises. Plus, ditch that where's my money feeling. Most transfers arrive in under 20 seconds. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees. Be smart, get wise. Download the wise app today. Ts and Cs apply.
- [01:16]
Matthew Rimsky
Hello everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Matthew Rimsky.
- [01:28]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker. We are on Instagram and threads at Conspiritualitypod as well as individually on BlueSky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
- [01:50]
Matthew Rimsky
Episode 314 JD Vance rebrands as Church dad for Prez as the gases slowly leak from Trump's orifices and IV holes, the bright flame of his inspiration for MAGA Christians is fading. Did he drain the swamp? Prosecute the pedophiles? Save the Holy Land? Lower gas prices? Give all the grill dads better health care? What was all the speaking in tongues for? JD Vance has an answer for the MAGA faithful. It's another memoir. It's another rebrand. And this one turns back to the device that made Hillbilly Elegy, a smash hit and also the worst book ever. Which is the gall to turn his personal and familial despair into a diagnosis of an entire culture in Appalachia. With communion finding my way back to faith, Vance plays a similar narcissistic trick. He turns his lifelong journey through right wing American Christianity with a short and shameful detour into new atheism to land in the Catholic faith of Leonard Leo. Sketching out a redemption plan for every bro who seeks their way home.
- [03:11]
Julian Walker
All right, so, Matthew, I just want to acknowledge here, you have put in the hard work you have. I want to thank you for your service. You read the book, you cross referenced with some of the things that you remember from his earlier book. You produced a whole video series that's up on our Instagram of the different thoughts you were having in the process. And you are basically going to be taking me and the listener by the hand and guiding us through this wasteland of narcissistic. I don't know what I will.
- [03:42]
Matthew Rimsky
And I'm grateful to do it. I got a little bit obsessed with it. I think that. Well, I'll tell you why I think it's an important document. I think it's a terrible book. But I also think it tells us a lot about, you know, this guy's going to be number 48 one way or the other, probably, right? So that's where I'll start. JD Vance is second in command for the brutal government of a world superpower that enables genocide, unilaterally launches war, kidnaps foreign leaders, has canceled enough foreign aid to cause tens of millions of projected deaths. And at home, he tells disgusting lies about immigrants, he leads bills to criminalize trans health care, and he cuts health care subsidies for millions. And as his dying leader falls asleep at cabinet meetings and bloodsport festivals, he stands slightly behind and to the side, and no one knows when he'll have to step forward and what will happen when he does. He has bitter rivals, his approval is 20 points underwater, and the coalition of tech oligarchs, corporate monarchists, and Christian dominionists, held together by authoritarian desires, is beginning to crack under the weight of failing foreign campaigns and increasing vitriol towards their sclerotic and farting leader. So there is no better time than for J.D. vance to return to the performance genre that launched his political career in 2016. The memoir, but not just any memoir, Finding My Way Home to Faith is the memoir of an everyman purporting to tell the story of an entire culture. A memoir that distracts his readership, if they can even be distracted anymore, from the material horrors gathering under his bootlicking leadership, the likely energy supply and food shortages brought on by attacking Iran, and the likely civil unrest provoked by the tech oligarchs who backed him, who can't stop squashing even red state city councils in their lust for building data centers.
- [05:49]
Julian Walker
And I want to just note here that both what he's been spending his time doing while VP during this insane period in our history. And then what he's chosen to write about is his journey to Catholicism.
- [06:05]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah.
- [06:05]
Julian Walker
And it sounds like you're saying this is the beginning of his pitch for 2028.
- [06:10]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. This is where he's centering his energy. He's putting it into. He's investing it into the religious story. I don't really think he has anything else, and I think it's effective in its way, because he knows he can't joke or meme his way out of this particular turning point. He knows he can't just sell this book to the listeners of Theo Vaughn or Joe Rogan. So he gets his promo spot on Fox and Friends, but he also has to sell it on the View. He has to convince Ross Douthat that he really has matured as a Catholic. He's arrived at power through a series of back doors, but now he has to come in through the front door. And what better way to come in the front door, but with the recuperation of the only morally salvageable content of the Trump administration in the eyes of those who are tempted to leave, which is the pretense that fascists from soft to hard are bound together by Christian values. And what better way to present that view than through the archetype of the hero's journey, in which Christianity is a road that winds through many geographies and climates and connects you with the full spectrum of your fellow travelers, but always brings you home. Or at least back to the holler.
- [07:25]
Julian Walker
Back to the holler. I mean, when everything else is incoherent and cruel and corrupted, I guess we can always come back to the transcendent truth of Jesus. But I can't help feel that he then is going to go out to bat for Satan right after. Right.
- [07:41]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, I think that it's not just that religion is the central sort of cohering theme of whatever campaign he's going to run, but that also he's building a feeling of folksiness and nostalgia that I think the Trump administration has probably exhausted. I don't think it's really there anymore. The juice is there anymore. But I can't emphasize enough how deeply unsettling it has been to read the spiritual memoir of this derpy enabler. It's just totally split off from what he has to walk around doing every day as a whiny police dog. So for this rebrand to work, it has to really create this whole cloth Persona, which is the same thing that he had to do with hillbilly elegy. So it's almost like he has to clone another JD Vance and avoid getting locked forever into the three Spider man meme with each hero pointing at the other in accusation. Like that one. He's the shitty politician.
- [08:45]
Julian Walker
Yeah, it's like some kind of weird multiple universe thing where he exists as these different. Slightly different characters in different realities.
- [08:52]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. So you know who's the real one? And is this even a memoir? Because what does a liar remember versus what does he want to tell you? Like he knew the Haitians in Springfield weren't illegal. We know because his staff told him and he kept telling the lie. He knew that they weren't spreading TB and aids, that they weren't eating dogs and cats. So what does he know about himself? That he's hiding or that Claude is advising him to hide?
- [09:21]
Julian Walker
And can I, can I just interject here to say that didn't, didn't he go on TV at some point and basically acknowledge that he was lying, but that it's okay to lie about certain things when the stakes are high enough or something?
- [09:33]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, he phrased it in a very slick way. He said, if I have to make up stories to bring the American people's attention to the plight or the media's attention to the plight of the American people, then I'll do that. And then he later said, I meant that if I have to sort of promote or expose or boost stories in order to gather attention for the things that the President really cares about, then that's what I'm going to do. So, yeah, he, he did. He did both at the same time. He said, he said, I was putting this on, but also I needed to put it on.
- [10:05]
Julian Walker
And it's perfect because it's exactly what you say he's doing at a larger scale here. He's making up stories to promote a perception that he feels is the way to draw attention to what he believes the American political body needs to be focused on.
- [10:23]
Matthew Rimsky
Right. So, you know, we have this sort of 10 year separation between Vance building a memoir bridge out of a kind of anonymity in his venture capital life, like nobody really knew who he was, and into heartland politics with hillbilly elegy. And here he's building a memoir bridge out of Trumpian chaos into a Jesus washed campaign and in communion. The memoirist, or the AI guided presidential campaign committee that wrote it is pretty earnest. He traces what I find to be a plausible journey from church to church through his childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, from having faith to losing it and then gaining it again. But he can't really help but to show his ass at every turn. And I believe it shines most bright and pale in the way he positions Usha in his book. And that says a lot about how much this rebranding operation needs to metabolize and launder the racism, the anti immigrant hatred, and the misogyny of the regime he actually presides over.
- [11:36]
Julian Walker
Yeah, the thing that I can't get away from is that Communion is also the name of the, you know, supposedly autobiographical book by Whitley Strieber, which is about how he was visited by aliens in the middle of the night. Like it's a whole mythology that gave birth to, you know, a career in perhaps, you know, tangentially similar ways. I. I've long wondered about how, how he reconciles everything you just described with the way he positions Usha in his kind of public profile and his self created mythology. How does he do this in the book?
- [12:14]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, it starts right from page one. He talks a lot about her in Communion, but, you know, even the most tender statements of a liar don't really tell us anything about Ouja, the person, you know, So I, I still don't have any real sense of her own politics or motivations or inner life. You know, he thinks she's lovely. She glides through rooms regardless of, you know, whatever shoes she's in. I guess that means she could be in heels or whatever, or flats or, you know, but she glides. She has the loveliest laugh he's ever heard. But, you know, I think she really remains a silent blank screen, which is perfect for a storyteller husband. And it's also perfect for the question of like, what the hell is she doing with a guy who cheerleads ice? That's not gonna get resolved here. Yeah, he actually dedicates the book to her. He says, to my darling Usha, who taught me to think on those things that are honest, just pure and lovely.
- [13:11]
Julian Walker
Wow. This is kind of. Hey, hey, Claude, can you write a dedication to my wife for maybe.
- [13:19]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. And throughout, she remains this guiding light to the extent, however, that she provides the emotional labor, the travel planning, the life planning, and even editing the book. So I've got this little thing in the acknowledgments, Julian, that you can read out.
- [13:36]
Julian Walker
He says her patience and skill as an editor made the book possible at first and then better over time. There is at least a little irony in the fact that my non Christian wife helped lead me back to my own Christian, Christian faith and then made it possible for me to discuss the journey on paper, the Lord works in mysterious ways indeed.
- [13:58]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. So we have this trope of the Hindu wife centering the Christian husband's self discovery, while he expresses throughout the book no curiosity at all about Hinduism. And I don't think I've heard him sort of wonder aloud or talk about his interest in Hinduism at all. I think he's talked about being sort of like, fascinated by vegetarian food or whatnot. But this is just laid out on page one as part of, you know, this opening in this bucolic self portrait, you know, of him as a bumbling dad trying to corral his kids to Sunday morning church through a jumble of shoes and whining. And then he says this.
- [14:42]
Julian Walker
In this, as in all things, Usha is the anchor managing the mayhem and packing our kids off to the car. She gives me a look as if to say, I'm not even Catholic. I just do this because I love you.
- [14:56]
Matthew Rimsky
So there's a very humanizing scene. I get this image of the beleaguered mom glowing with kindness, but also exhaustion, like Carol Brady in the Brady Bunch in the midst of the storm. Only this Carol Brady is brown, selfless, the foreign wife who's there to support the Christian husband. And maybe that's how she is acceptable to whatever slice of the MAGA coalition that doesn't find him too cringe to stand. Because she's not only the subordinate wife, but she's the wife from a subordinate culture, but also from a nation where the ruling party shares American fascist ideals.
- [15:35]
Julian Walker
Yeah. You know, given that at a Turning Point USA event last year, you remember this, he publicly said that he hopes she will convert one day to Christianity. And that was almost like they were playing tag, where a. A couple months previously she was on a podcast and she said she was Hindu and she has no desire to convert. I can only imagine the actual religious tension behind the scenes in their marriage. But I also want to say, you know, good for her, that she's just clear about who she is.
- [16:07]
Matthew Rimsky
So I'll return to Usha in segment three, and also to Mamaw, who is Vance's grandmother, who he largely grew up with on account of his own mother's substance issue problems.
- [16:20]
Julian Walker
That.
- [16:20]
Matthew Rimsky
Because if there's any truth at all to J.D. vance's life, it's that he utterly depends on women. And that puts the cat lady comment into another light, I think.
- [16:30]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [16:31]
Matthew Rimsky
And I think that because he knows this, he has to be smarter than the rest of the Jesus bros in his circle. And he does that by actually acknowledging the costs of social reproduction in this book. Very surprising. And even how the metrics like of GDP and such hide them. But what he does. So I'll do a lot on this in the segment, in segment three, what he does is he redirects that realization away from its logical conclusion in feminism to lock it into the Catholic social teaching that comes out of a century ago. And ultimately, I think this is one of the core benefits that Vance finds politically in his Catholic conversion. Because aside from making him tight with Leonard Leo and the Project 2025 crew, aside from the ability to appeal to a universal tradition, I believe Vance will use the interpretability of Catholic social teaching to perform a kinder version of MAGA cruelty. Now, the core hook of this book, in my opinion, is how authentic Christian Everyman Vance builds his character meticulously from chapter one with details that are eccentric and borderline endearing enough that I'm not sure AI came up with them unless he used mythos, I guess. So for instance, you know, little JD is 7 years old and he's struggling to understand how a soul could reach heaven if the body was trapped in a coffin. And so he says to Mamaw, so the soul is like the bullet and the body is like the casing, and God shoots off the bullet to heaven, but the casing gets trapped here on earth.
- [18:14]
Julian Walker
Oh my God, it's just so perfect, right?
- [18:19]
Matthew Rimsky
So there's that story. Or he leaves his Southern Baptist roots and he goes through a purity culture evangelical phase where he has to hide his Black Sabbath CDs. And he's reading the Left behind series and he's going on campaigns against his future culture warrior comrade, J.K. rowling, because the Harry Potter series is satanic. And then in 2005, as a non combat Marine in Iraq, he's reading the Narnia Books by C.S. lewis, the Kids books. And he's kind of afraid that the other grunts will laugh at him, but he can't stop thinking about how cool it would be if Aslan the Lion was his personal Jesus. So these things don't seem made up to me. Right. They seem like, I don't know, you know, I don't know who would come up with that otherwise. And it sounds like a real journey. And I think it's a journey that probably pushes a lot of tender emotional buttons for a lot of Christians in the country who are yearning for a return to innocence while they sit vigil during the Trump death watch. And Vance has a lot of practice at pushing those buttons. As I've said, this is his second memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, came out in 2016, endearing him to the GOP intelligentsia as the kid who could speak eloquently to the travails of working class white kids while actively suppressing any notion that socialism might improve their lot. And why was Appalachia so down on his luck, according to Vance? Why had Vance's family been riven by substance abuse and mental health challenges? It wasn't because the region has been systematically oppressed by absentee landlords over the timber and minerals. It's not because, like in 1921, 10,000 armed West Virginia miners, black and white folks together, marched against coal company bosses and then were bombed by private and federal aircraft. Aircraft killing as many as 100.
- [20:18]
Julian Walker
Jesus.
- [20:19]
Matthew Rimsky
It's not because of patterns of neglect that pervade the present day. I don't know if you've heard about this, Julian, but the feds have only delivered 7 billion out of the 60 billion in aid needed to the Carolinas or promised to the Carolinas to repair after Hurricane Helene, which hit in September of 2024. So these are all not reasons in Vance's world, Like Appalachia, for him is hobbled, what he calls a culture of poverty, which leads to bad personal choices and, you know, insufficient grit. And these are problems that he could speak to because he knew these problems himself intimately, even though he pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
- [21:03]
Julian Walker
Yeah, it's kind of the prosperity gospel diagnosis that we're familiar with in terms of New Age victim blaming. Right. It's not. It's not any number of different outside conditions. It's really your mental attitude and your. Your lack, sort of moral fiber and ability to sort of keep. Keep moving forward that has caused your suffering. Yeah.
- [21:26]
Matthew Rimsky
And a lot of Appalachian writers have answered. There's a guy named Anthony Harkins who co edited a collection called Appalachian Reckoning, who wrote that it's totally legitimate for anybody to tell their story, but to then present it as the story of Appalachia, to speak of a memoir of a culture is problematic. And then Elizabeth Catt, in a book called what yout are getting WR Appalachia from 2018, you know, said something similar like, Vance transforms the elegy from a memoir of a person to the memoir of a. Of a culture. And in communion, he repeats this, but on a different axis. So in Hillbilly Elegy, his family stood in for the entire region. But in the sequel, Vance is wandering through religious affiliations. So, you know, there's amorphous Protestantism there's evangelical charismatic churches, there's Marine Corps prayer culture, There's a stint in atheism, and Ayn Rand's objectivism. And then there's this period of, like, Yale secular meritocracy before he arrives at Catholicism. It's presented as a kind of completed Forrest Gump itinerary through nearly every major religious secular subculture of the last 40 years.
- [22:46]
Julian Walker
That's incredible. I mean. I mean, spiritually, though, these are all just different Christian denominations, with the exception of the Ayn Rand inflected atheism, which is sort of. That's a rite of passage for a lot of conservatives when they're at university. Right. And it's basically an education in why compassion is a bad thing. So that when they return to Christianity, it's more muscular Christianity. Yeah.
- [23:13]
Matthew Rimsky
They can carry with them the analysis of toxic empathy.
- [23:16]
Julian Walker
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he didn't get to yoga or mindfulness or New Age channeling or, you know, any of the wellness stuff that would have maybe sent him in RFK's direction later, like a lot of people we cover. And he also didn't go to the Christian left. So there's, like, no Unitarian Universalist phase, right?
- [23:33]
Matthew Rimsky
No, no. It's a tour of the religious right. And, you know, it becomes this journey that stands in for the available options in that zone. And then his Catholic conversion, which, you know, whether it's in good faith or not, becomes this synthesis that resolves the prior versions of himself. And so, on a larger scale, it's like we're witnessing the reversal of the Reformation in a single dude. And just as the elegy erases the material conditions of Appalachia in favor of psychologizing the suffering of hillbillies and moralizing about their failures. And in communion, he erases the material conditions that drive people to seek out and leave religious communities. Because for Vance, it's all about the individual. And across the two books, the causal frame for fortune shifts from merit in the elegy to providence in communion. And so, you know, later on, I'll return to the narcissism of this technique and how its function of erasing material conditions traces back to France's patron saint, Augustine.
- [24:41]
Julian Walker
Ah, yeah. I mean, the kind of narrative that you're describing, it seems too easily to paint the hero as always ascending, right. To greater and greater heights of transcendent truth, like going through the veils of illusion so as to then arrive at a final enlightenment. And that's the place where this book is being written. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses Setup required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18/. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
- [25:44]
Matthew Rimsky
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll
- [25:47]
Julian Walker
love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
- [26:27]
Matthew Rimsky
Hey, it's Matthew here from Conspirituality recommending you tune in to the Trust Me podcast where cult survivors Lola Blanc and Megan Elizabeth talk to former believers, experts, and sometimes even the people still inside to analyze how these systems work. They had me on to discuss my culty life and journalism, and I found them super well informed and empathetic and funny. They bring you real stories about how easy it is to fall for something that seems just right. So if you're into cults, coercion, or just wild human behavior, listen to Trust me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so I think we have an overview of what Vance is up to here. In this segment, I want to get into how many demographics he needs to speak to in this book as he plots out a presidency that can prevent further schism. And then in the home stretch, I'll get into his Catholic head a little bit more and what I can make of his strategy. And the spoiler this notion of preventing schism is central, I think, because in some ways he shares a functional affinity with Popes Francis and Leo in that reg, even if he can't understand their theology. Or more likely he understands it and says no, that's not for me. Like he needs to join people together. Now, as I've said, this memoir Everyman Forrest Gump format, lets Vance travel from church to church. He compliments them all. He's very warm in his memories about his various encounters and his community experiences. But he also speaks frankly of differences in approach and belief and and I think because these are differences that can often rise to real tension and maybe even sectarian conflict when they're all brought together under the rubric of, you know, America is maturing spiritually, just like me. There's something soft and chummy about it.
- [28:12]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, it feels to me like the friendly common sense theology of the common man from the heartland tech bro who's funded by Peter Thiel, who thinks environmentalists and AI watchdog groups are literally the Antichrist. It's all a bit. Bit contradictory.
- [28:28]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. Yeah. Well, he has to mend all of that stuff together, like, in his personality. So, yeah, I think that Vance's aim is to speak to how American Christians who have supported Trump may feel a need for some unifying figure and resolve their cognitive dissonance and begin the project of reimagining political power that's not associated with a pedophile oligarchy. I think there's gotta be a significant demographic out there who long for less conflict, or at least the appearance of less conflict, and maybe to feel the violence of their Christian nationalism softened into something that feels more like nostalgia, like a Ron Howard movie that would help them forget about the Medicaid cuts or the coming oil and food shocks before the credits roll. Like, I feel Trump ripped the mask off of American conservatism and its Christian support, and Vance is betting that he needs to put it back on at least a little bit.
- [29:29]
Julian Walker
Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, it'd be interesting to try to ascertain how big the demographic is that at this point is actually becoming bothered by those dissonances between religious self image and the reality, the social reality of Trump policies and the larger realities. Of course, and certainly passionately, right wing evangelicals have never seemed too tortured by anything we could call a conscience or a clear sense of reality. In that regard, it has seemed to me in the Trump years that he's kind of a means to an end in terms of their larger prophetic belief system and project. Like, a lot of them are frank, that they're willing to hold their noses. They see him as King Cyrus. They've got a whole mythological rationalization around his imperfections.
- [30:14]
Matthew Rimsky
Right. You know, I think it's why the figure of Mamaw is so important both in Hillbilly Elegy, but also in this book, because she really provides a foil for strength and inspiration in the era or the shadow of Trump. And I think that there's a lot going on with his focus on her as, you know, believing in a God that was loving, forgiving, but also tough and demanding. And then his joke is possibly Packing heat.
- [30:53]
Julian Walker
Oh, wow, my God has a bigger gun. Just for when he's not feeling particularly forgiving.
- [30:59]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, I mean, he says that she owned 19 loaded handguns at the time of her death. You know, she swore like a sailor. So there's, there's, she is unbound in a way. She is free in terms of her passions in the same way that Trump is, but she's actually like a caregiver. I think there's something very interesting going on there.
- [31:20]
Julian Walker
She sounds kind of paranoid and fairly bitter in that description, too, which is not what I generally associate with piety. But.
- [31:28]
Matthew Rimsky
Okay, well, these are things that he admired about her, and they kind of fight against this libertarian me and my God profile because he's really emphasizing the personal relationship here. And he admires her toughness, especially as she's often on her own and then accordingly, beyond her home. His early experience of Christianity was not an intellectual pursuit. It was a community culture where family and friends gathered around his great grandmother's deathbed to sing Amazing Grace, a place where Christianity was what he calls a way of life that connected us to our ancestors. So he's also invoking something much more rustic, rural, that's not a set of ideas, which is kind of strange when we get to what comes later. And I think if you squint carefully enough, you can see the elision between this folksy nostalgia and the white Christian nationalism that's always lurking in the shadows. And always there's this emotional fallback position that's framed in anti intellectual terms. So he's got a down home church dad voice that he brings to this book. And I think it's a good choice. It's a smart choice given the frayed coalition strands he has to appeal to. And I've counted four distinct currents that maybe are standing at the corners of Trump's deathbed, and they're each making their bid for what comes next. And Vance needs to position himself as the figure who can speak to all of them at once, who can translate between them. So what are these currents? So, and we've looked at all of these individually, and I think they're, they're gathering around here now for the vigil. First, we have the explicit confessional Christian nationalism of people like Josh Hawley, who is openly calling America a Christian nation, of people like Eric Schmidt declaring that America belongs to Christians and only Christians, and figures like David Lane, who's running an organized project to recruit hundreds of pastors to run for office in 20, 26 and 20 with both Trump and Vance recording supportive video messages for that effort. And of course, the new Apostolic Reformation and its seven Mountain mandate swirls around all of these people like incense. This is the crowd that believes the state is an instrument that should be explicitly re Christianized. And their fingerprints are all over the DOJ's anti Christian bias task force, for example, and the White House Faith Office and the new embassy reporting requirements on pronoun policies and prad flags. So the polling shows that roughly 2/3 of white evangelicals now qualify as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers. And so this is a current with momentum and I think it's independent of any single leader and it will survive beyond Trump.
- [34:35]
Julian Walker
It's fascinating because traditionally a lot of these folks that you just described have been the same people who don't even classify Catholicism as Christianity. Like I've heard them talk about, they're like, I'm Christian. Those people are not Christian, they're Catholic.
- [34:49]
Matthew Rimsky
Right. And so what does Vance make of that? I think functionally they've had to be allied with the Catholics for as long as they've taken the anti abortion turn in the 1970s because the Catholics had their own sort of coherent theology of the person.
- [35:06]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So politically aligned in that sense, despite the other schisms.
- [35:12]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, yeah. But I think they're getting closer. So there's a second group comprised of the tech rights quasi theological turn. Peter Thiel is the exemplar here with his closed door lectures on the Antichrist in which he named Greta Thunberg as the candidate for the role of Antichrist. He denounced the International Criminal Court as an Antichrist vehicle and described Putin's Russia as a potential New Rome. So this isn't Christian nationalism in Hawley's populist electoral sense. It's like in elite, I don't know, esoteric political theology with techno feudalism used to justify accelerationist and transhumanist technology projects that have apocalyptic implications and they describe them in apocalyptic terms. So these are guys who read Dugan and Vance's buddy Curtis Yarvin. And we should also point out that there's a certain amount of shitposting instability here because people like Rod Dreher, who's a close Vance friend, has actually broken with his crowd by calling Thiel and similar tech figures Faustian alchemists and declaring AI is demonic. So Vance's own bro circle is not unified. He's going to need to triangulate.
- [36:38]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So with Dreher, he's this American journalist and Eastern Orthodox Christian intellectual who moved to Hungary. I'M sure at an invitation to defend Orban's illiberal democracy, but he sees Peter's heel as a bridge too far. It's fascinating.
- [36:54]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, I think it really sort of expresses the distance and the paradox between the older blood and soil fascistic tendencies. Even though Orban is a big tech person too, and whatever Teal has going on, I think that, that everything that I know about Dreyer is, you know, that he goes to Eastern Europe and he feels like he's, you know, one with the, I don't know, the, with the winds and the hills and, and the, and the, and the forests and stuff. Right. So. Yeah, yeah, but I, I think that's also a bit of a ruse because I think or Orban has his own cryptocurrency or whatever. So the third current is the intellectual, post liberal and integralist movement. So people like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Verme, and figures with genealogical ties to Rushduni's Christian Reconstructionism. This is Pete Hegseth's personal pastor, who leads a church in this lineage and reportedly prayed to King Jesus at a Pentagon service declaring that Trump was divinely appointed. So those are the integralists.
- [38:04]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So that's Doug Wilson you're referring to, who's heavily influenced by Rashidouni. We're starting to get knee deep in a bunch of names here of these different thinkers, Deneen and Vermeil, essentially post liberal Catholic reactionaries, as best as they understand it, who see social progress as a net negative and advocate for more traditional society and governance. Traditional in. In scare quotes. And then Rushdouni was a Calvinist.
- [38:33]
Matthew Rimsky
Nice.
- [38:34]
Julian Walker
And. And a more open champion of the Dominionist mandate for Protestant Christians to rule over all the major vectors of power and influence. Those are the famous Seven Mountains. Right, Right. And then you've got Doug Wilson's Christ chur literally taken over the town of Moscow, Idaho. And he's sort of one of the most widely covered proponents of this idea that for us to really be a Christian nation, women should no longer have the vote.
- [39:01]
Matthew Rimsky
Right. And Vance is reportedly personally close to several of these leading integralists. And, you know, it's a current that is interesting for him as somebody who's going to be campaigning because they're not that interested in electoral majorities. They really want to reshape shape the whole legal and constitutional theory of the nation away from any kind of, you know, liberal pluralism or democracy.
- [39:29]
Julian Walker
Yeah. There's an anti democratic aspect to all of this. So, again, this is fascinating to me and I know you have your Own sort of deep interpretation of all of this, that some of these integralists are Catholic, but then they're overlapping with these Protestants that we're mentioning in their notion of governance being subordinate to religious edicts. And they're the ones who've been sort of ascendant. I feel like I got so fascinated with Leonard Leo a couple years ago because I felt like he was this ascendant Catholic force who was, who was having such a big influence on Trump's, on enabling Trump essentially through his dominance of the Supreme Court and all of the other courts in the country too, that he's been very focused on stacking. So, yeah, this is an odd alliance even, you know, like most of these people are. They're very, they're very doctrinaire, like they have very specific ideology that they're champion in opposition with one another somehow. You're talking about Vance being able to find the way to square that circle, right?
- [40:32]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, I think that's what this book is trying to do. And I think he belongs to maybe a fourth demographic. It's like he is attempting this new register of being pastoral, therapeutic, confessional, oriented around personal conversion and the vagueness of putting Christ at the center of your life rather than any explicit dominion theology. And I found a good analysis from the Institut Montaigne that Vance's dual identity as both child of the dispossessed and member of the meritocratic elite and his Christian nationalism coupled with a multicultural family life lets him be read by the populist Christian base as a kind of Augustinian statesman while remaining just, you know, legible to tech oligarchs as a sympathetic and non threatening figure. Somebody who's not going to intervene and is, you know, probably going to support all of their, you know, rapacious business instincts. And this positioning, however, is also where perhaps the sharpest paradox sits. Because when he spouts off on the limits of Christian spiritual love towards struggling people, he draws a public rebuke from Pope Francis, who he describes meeting with the day before his death. So there's a lot of elements in the air that he has to try to combine. And he has big shoes to fill as this young church dad. You know, he's not presiding over a single dominant faction. He's having to act as a translator between them all. There are explicit nationalists who are supplying the votes and institutional infrastructure. There's the tech, right, that's supplying capital and a permission structure for the AI and biotech ambitions that are, you know, framed in these providential terms. And then there's Integralists who are supplying intellectual legitimacy for or, you know, executive expansion. And Vance has to mug the public face. That sounds reasonable. That sounds wounded. That presents itself as searching and devout to audiences who would recoil from any one of the other currents that, you know, might present themselves in their own terms.
- [43:00]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I think that's. That, that's really fascinating. It's like he's made the calculation that being explicitly political about his religion is not advantageous. But having religion in a. In a very personal, emotional, every man kind of sense be somehow aligned with his political mission and candidacy is, Is perhaps much more appealing to people who don't necessarily want to be as invested in an explicitly Christian nationalist, Josh Hawley style, or Joel Webbing style of just overt rhetoric about how the government should be controlled by Christians. It's more like, but Christianity is good and we are a Christian nation because we are good people. And then don't worry about how the sausage gets made.
- [44:01]
Matthew Rimsky
Right. Yeah, it informs us together, all together. It doesn't have to be the sort of bleeding edge of how we do politics, but it can be our shared heritage. That's the feeling that I think is transmitted. And I think that, you know, for anyone who wants to throw their lot in with him, it will serve them well.
- [44:28]
Julian Walker
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Matthew Rimsky
the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing.
- [45:31]
Julian Walker
Hey, if they'll kill a cop and bury him, what are they gonna do to me? What really happened to the missing deputy?
- [45:38]
Matthew Rimsky
Valley of Shadows, A New series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's high desert. Listen to Valley of Shadows wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman. You may know me as the host of Reply all, but I'm done with that. I'm doing something else now. I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed. On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them. Some massive and life altering and some so miniscule it'll ballgame your mind. No matter the problem, no matter the size. I'm here for you. That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or@hyperfixedpod.com. Okay, top of the last segment here, I'm going to mention a few quirks that I found really interesting. The first is that Vance's narcissism, which pervades the book. Book gave me this new insight into how maga Christianity views the panicked necessity of the faithful building very large heteronormative families early on in life. So in one section he's talking about his own fitful maturation process and then he makes the following generalization.
- [46:59]
Julian Walker
However moody they're capable of being, most well adjusted adolescents don't tend to dwell on existential questions like, like what awaits them in the afterlife. In my experience, it tends to take having your own kids and caring for elderly loved ones to really get there. And as Western society continues to push back family formation later and later into life, the reality is that most young people won't be forced to reckon with such weighty issues. Not by the secular world anyway.
- [47:30]
Matthew Rimsky
I cannot get over how weird that paragraph is. I've never read anything like that.
- [47:37]
Julian Walker
It really is. It's like he tried to. He's like squeezing in these different culture war kind of notions. In a way that just sounds like folksy common sense. Right?
- [47:47]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, it also sounds like he was never a child or a teenager. And I mean, so as a dad with kids who have asked questions about death and existence from 5 years old.
- [48:00]
Julian Walker
Same here.
- [48:01]
Matthew Rimsky
Our secular house.
- [48:02]
Julian Walker
Same here.
- [48:03]
Matthew Rimsky
Like, this is incredible. Like, I don't know. Yeah, it's very strange. And so his whole point is if you don't have kids, you will not have an inner life.
- [48:21]
Julian Walker
Yeah, you won't ask the big questions because you're well adjusted and you're just rolling along. I mean, kids in my experience innately ask these sorts of questions at some point. They're like, I mean, we went through a long phase where My daughter was saying, but I don't want to die. Are you going to die? Am I going to die?
- [48:39]
Matthew Rimsky
What happens when we die?
- [48:40]
Julian Walker
It's just like there was a period of time where she talked about that every time we were in the car together. And every other parent I've talked to has said, oh, yeah, I know that phase. And isn't adolescence the time when so many people question everything about life, about relationships, about society, about. So it's like a cliche that adolescents are saying, what is it all for anyway? And society is so fake. And I don't know about this religion. By well adjusted, he seems to mean incurious and repressed and shut down. And then he's also claiming that the secular world stops young people from reckoning with existential questions or things that have any sort of depth and meaning. I mean, give me a break, dude. And then the whole idea that, like, the way our society has evolved, people are getting married later and later. So I guess this means that they don't really start asking these questions until, you know, I don't know, their 40s.
- [49:41]
Matthew Rimsky
It's also contradictory to his own journey because, you know, in his own life, he's dealing with divorce and substance abuse and death in the immediate family from this early age. But maybe the problem is that he was immersed in religion and they could talk about the issues but couldn't really feel them or something. I don't know. But his answer is that, you know, people should jump into that flesh fire sooner of family life with less preparation because, you know, you're just dicking around otherwise. So the indoctrination into the value of early parenthood is. Became really clear. Another angle of it became really clear to me here. It's hard to wrap my head around until the familiar answer comes back, which is, despite Vance hiding it, early parenthood is like a heavy, heavy, heavy tool of social control. If it's, you know, know, you know, enthusiastically encouraged.
- [50:38]
Julian Walker
Meaning having kids at a. At a younger age.
- [50:41]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, like. Like what? At what point in your. In early parenthood or parenthood at an early age are you able to really start to, like, look around at what's happening to you and assess what your conditions are? Like, your focus has to internalize or be limited to the door, right?
- [50:59]
Julian Walker
Yeah, you're on the hamster wheel.
- [51:00]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah.
- [51:01]
Julian Walker
Like, yeah.
- [51:02]
Matthew Rimsky
So anyway, I'm sure that's the best world for them.
- [51:07]
Julian Walker
I mean, there's another thing here which I just have to say, which is that this, within that paragraph is the implication that the only real answer to the existential questions is Christianity. And what is the central existential question? What happens after we die? Die. And that you only come to the serious answer, which is faith in Jesus. If you're ever really asking that question seriously. And I just reject that outright, I think it's the opposite.
- [51:44]
Matthew Rimsky
So here's another random bit that I found interesting, and I don't know where else to put it in this review. And it's where his narcissism takes on this other task, which is that of amateur revisionist historian for American Christianity. So this is an sort of job that he's doing. I think he's trying to make everybody feel better about how this is cashed out, intermingled with his personal journey. He tells this story of how over the past half century, the Christian conservative movement has grown naturally, organically, that it's been responding to the slings and arrows of secularization, moral decay, and a growing feeling of emptiness that it can't quite attribute to capitalism. Just like he did.
- [52:28]
Julian Walker
Not only that, but black and white kids going to school together.
- [52:31]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, we'll get there. Because, I mean, and this is the thing is that is that somehow there's this. It's not like the Moral Majority is creating the crisis of secularization. It's not like they're creating a sense of moral decay. It's that they're responding to it. It's just happening. It's like climate change, actually. Everything is changing. And so they're rising to the task. Yes. So as we've covered extensively on the show, what really happened in the history of the activation of American evangelicalism is that in the 1970s, the IRS began stripping tax exemptions from segregated Christian schools. And, you know, Bob Jones University was at the heart of the resistance to this, which was just a basic attempt to deepen the separation between church and state and, you know, to extend the legacy of civil rights. And ghouls like Paul Weyrick and Jerry Falwell used this attack, this purported attack from the purported deep State to organize their own Christian coalitions and moral majorities. But the problem was they couldn't openly rally around the racism of resegregation demands. And so they cynically turned to abortion, even though nobody in their denominations cared a lick about that. They had always considered abortion a matter of conscience. And, you know, Protestant and evangelical women were like, what are you talking about? Like, of course we're going to make our own decisions about this. And they were like, no, no, no. Actually, this is our new political issue. And we have power and you don't. So we're going to make it that way. So in this retelling, Vance is also trying to reassure the Christian church that just like him, Christianity took over the powers, the levers of power on a stage. So, okay, homestretch. He arrives at Catholicism. What will he use it for? So, Julian, I think there's a part in here for you. You'll be so interested to know that Vance came to Catholicism through a detour, through new atheism. But the new atheism just kind of made him feel too sad and disconnected and he, and he didn't really want to go on thinking for himself. And so about halfway through communion, he's at Yale Law. He describes arriving as a strident atheist and a meritocrat. He's bereaving deaths in the family. He's had a weird experience with his Iraq deployment where it's quite ambivalent. He actually has some, you know, ambivalent moments over foreign policy where he's sitting there and he's like wondering, oh, are these cultures really so different? And so on. He has a journeying opening, you know, mind that allows for the possibility that other people have different life ways and so on. But he's also really inspired by writers like Christopher Hitchens and Ayn Rand who catalyze his non belief. However, he then encounters St. Augustine and Rene Girard. St. Augustine on his own, I think, and Rene Girard via Peter Thiel at Yale. I think he gave a lecture there and this created the first cracks in his secular worldview.
- [56:02]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean, it's. Some of it is familiar. Right. The data does show that increased education generally correlates with decreased religiosity as people learn more about the world and maybe study science and these sorts of things. But then the pseudo intellectualism and the in group cultish appeal of that invitation only exposure to Peter Thiel's cockamamie lectures and these reading groups and Rene Girard, it sounds like it swayed him into putting a new coat of paint on his earlier religious roots. And, you know, I, I would guess that when he describes himself as a strident atheist, he's kind of, you know, he's, he's doing that for effect because he knows that's a, that's a caricature that everybody dislikes. I was one of those terrible atheists. And then I found, I mean, I think it's, it's actually probably pretty rare that people become, you know, passionate atheists and then somehow end up getting Catholic.
- [57:00]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, that's a good Point, actually. And I didn't think about how, like, it would be a good part of the storytelling to say, oh, yeah, I was that person that you hate, actually. And then I figured out that you're right after all, and that we really are friends. Yeah. So have you. I mean, you would know, wouldn't you? Would you? Have you heard of anybody who went deep into new atheism and then came out the other side of Catholic?
- [57:21]
Julian Walker
No, I don't. I. I've never.
- [57:23]
Matthew Rimsky
Not a single person.
- [57:24]
Julian Walker
That narrative. No, I mean, I'm sure there. I'm sure they are. Yeah. I've just not really seen them. I don't think it's a common trajectory. The closest is someone like Alex o', Connor, who's a very prominent atheist thinker, who was so into it that he ended up studying. He got really into philosophy, and then he also, I think, did a master's in theology, and he got really, really into studying the Bible. And now he's sort of making a career for himself as the new atheist who talks to religious intellectuals, you know, and has found. Found a way to marry that sort of conversation whilst remaining an atheist. Right. But being critical of aspects of atheism that he believes are not philosophically sophisticated enough. That's. That's the closest that I've seen.
- [58:12]
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
- [58:13]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [58:14]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. Well, I think that we did a good segment a while back on Girard, and I think he's a really important influence through. Through Thiel. So I'll just. A little brief refresher on that, because I think it's important for sort of a key way in which he comes to interpret how he will use Catholic social teaching. So Girard provides a way for people like Thiel and Vance to reconcile the meritocratic capitalism that they're, you know, sort of living within with what they feel might be a higher meaning. And this is very important for Vance. So Girard holds that human desire is mimetic or imitative, like people want things because other people want them, and that therefore envy and rivalry drive human violence, especially mob violence. And this is historically discharged through ritual scapegoating. And so Christ's innocence exposes the immorality of that scapegoating, and that launches a moral rather than a material revolution or a change in consciousness about envy and whether or not you should have it. So Girard does not say that envy is resolved through a redistribution of wealth, but through this new understanding of the corruption or the absurdity of scapegoating. And so this makes Girard really useful to People like Thiel because it gives a non Marxist critique of capitalism's competition. And it also lets him imagine mastering the techniques of desire to preserve its productive churn while avoiding its violent backlash. But of course, you know, he might become the scapegoat himself. And this is why he goes on and on about the Antichrist and frames figures like Thunberg as being in that category. You know, because he basically says that Thunberg casts Christ's victim language in her favor to repaganize and then re legitimize a kind of mob violence or vengeance against people who are successful. That's this whole thing.
- [60:33]
Julian Walker
So it's, it's the wrong kind of human sacrifice. Yes, right, right. Human sacrifice for the wrong reasons. Yeah, envy really becomes, I hear this a lot from these folks, the linchpin of this particular kind of anti Marxist or anti socialist, anti empathic grandiose will to power mythology. It's not that far from Ayn Rand actually. It just adds some sort of mythopoetic magic, right?
- [60:58]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, and it has to be. I think it protests too much too because I don't know what I would be envious of, to be honest. And I think if you asked most people, if I don't know, this is just a vibes based statement. Totally. But if you ask, asked most people what they actually wanted in terms of their own sort of personal comfort, they would describe, you know, adequate, you know, middle or lower middle class living standards and you know, access to healthcare. Right.
- [61:34]
Julian Walker
And then love and happiness and being a good person and living an authentic life and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, the envy in this case is framed as like anyone who is left of center and especially the further left you go. So they're really just losers who are envious of the power and wealth and you know, I don't know what the Botox girlfriend or what they're envious of. All the things that the oligarchs have. And their answer to that is that we need to tear the system down and redistribute the wealth. Because they can't. They're not creators, they're takers. Right. It's that whole narrative.
- [62:09]
Matthew Rimsky
Let me turn to the other main influence that bumps Vance towards his Catholic conversion. And this is the eloquence of St. Augustine, who is the fifth century North African church father whose personal writings kind of they create this psychological pathway out of the Roman Empire and into modernity for his inheritors. Now specifically, Augustine provides Vance with an argument that helps him resolve the key embarrassment that he felt as an American Christian. It's a cultural weakness, in his view, which you'll find interesting, Julian. It's the rejection of science. So, you know, when he's growing up as a creationist and somebody who's expecting to be left behind or not left behind, there's this niggling doubt in his mind that this could be true. And that really, really bothers him. And he comes across this essay in Augustine and it's on the meaning of Genesis, and it's written around the year 400. And in the essay, Augustine says that Christians really shouldn't abandon the sciences, but the reason is it's not because they're important in and of themselves. It's not because of truth value. What?
- [63:38]
Julian Walker
It's strategic. Strategic, yeah.
- [63:41]
Matthew Rimsky
It's because if they cannot speak in an educated manner about whatever it is, the movement of the stars or husbandry or, you know, what have you, they will look stupid in front of their non Christian peers who of course, they're trying to recruit. And so Augustine's warning is that Christians who confidently assert scriptural claims that contradict obvious empirical knowledge, they just embarrass the shit out of everybody. And then those potential recruits will then dismiss Scripture's authority on the things that really matter, Julian, like resurrection, eternal life, the kingdom of heaven.
- [64:22]
Julian Walker
Yeah, the big questions. It reminds me of the whole non overlapping magisteria kind of idea from Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist. Right. And it seems like it's actually quite in line with where Catholicism ended up increasingly in the 20th century. Right. That we have to have this sense that we can accept all of these scientific truths as they are discovered alongside these central tenets of faith.
- [64:52]
Matthew Rimsky
And I think that this being highlighted in Vance's memoir gives me some additional insight into how American Christians who wind up supporting conservative and even fascist movements, how they regard science, if they use it at all. It's like they're not using it to argue the content on its merits. They're using it to appear socially acceptable, to not appear as rubes, to be impressive in front of their constituency. I mean, this is like RFK Jr. To a T. Yeah.
- [65:27]
Julian Walker
I mean, it also, it makes me think of Galileo, right. He did that sort of neat bit of hedging. And that famous quote about it being the intention of the Holy Spirit to teach us how the heavens, to teach us how to go to heaven. Heaven, not how the heavens go. Right. These are fundamentally two different questions. Of course, it didn't stop him from falling afoul of the Inquisition, ending Up under house arrest until he died for daring to say that the sun didn't go around the earth.
- [65:56]
Matthew Rimsky
Speaking of the Inquisition, back to Augustine, because, you know, there's another influence here on Vance, which is that that Augustine's favorite genre of writing is the memoir. His confessions actually pioneer long form, first person reflection at the root of global Northwestern whatever culture, Christian culture. And like Vance, he's writing all about his internal feelings while waging a war against anti imperialists. So as he's writing the Confessions, this is around 400, he's also, as bishop of Hippo, issuing letters to discipline a sect called the Donatists. These were North African Christians and they had been violently repressed by the Roman Empire. And when the repression ended, they argued that sacraments administered by priests who had collaborated with the Romans were actually not valid. It was like, we don't want you baptizing us. You suck, you were traitors, you hurt us. And Augustine argued against them theologically because his primary interest was to prevent schism.
- [67:23]
Julian Walker
Right.
- [67:24]
Matthew Rimsky
And he became the first major Christian thinker to develop a theological justification for forcing them to comply. And that even ext. Extended to a justification for using state violence to compel religious conformity in general. So this is the intellectual origin of what would eventually become inquisitorial doctrine. So like Vance, Augustine is simultaneously writing a very intimate, psychologically compelling account of his spiritual searching while constructing the architecture for state sponsored religious coercion.
- [68:03]
Julian Walker
And if I remember, you can correct me if I'm wrong, isn't he also confessing a lot of sort of intense sexual appetite and acting out of his sexual desires until he gets to the point where he then advises both himself and others to exercise extreme sexual restraint? And he's also quite anti homosexual, right?
- [68:25]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. Oh, there's all of that. Yeah. So he goes through a big purification process and he unburdens himself of his prior life. And so, yeah, there's that, that resonance there too with, with what Vance has to, has to offer in his memoir.
- [68:38]
Julian Walker
And there's an irony there too for this guy. Like he's a, he's a Berber, right? And he's, he's sort of, he's going against, you know, in a way helping his own people in an anticolonial kind of sense. But I mean, you know, a lot of his thinking predates of what we think of today as separation of church and state. So talking about using military might to enfor religious and monarchical coercive powers is kind of more the norm in a way.
- [69:12]
Matthew Rimsky
Right, sure, yeah. I mean, he was a Christian boss man negotiating the onboarding of Christianity into a crumbling Roman Empire. So he had to be troubled by the Roman imperial cult's equation of military glory with divine favor.
- [69:34]
Julian Walker
Yeah, because this is a big theme in his writing, too. Right. That he's also critical of it, even though he wants to deploy it in the places where he believes it's a
- [69:41]
Matthew Rimsky
good thing, he doesn't like the way they're doing it.
- [69:43]
Julian Walker
Okay.
- [69:44]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. So he argues in City of God that earthly political power has no inherent sanctity, but what's a bishop to do when he starts gaining earthly power? So his argument, his solution was that coercion was justified not to glorify state power, but to save souls from schism. And so that becomes the. The root of the Inquisition. And it's a distinction that let him oppose, you know, imperial theology in principle while requesting its, you know, benefits. And the Donatists, of course, said, hey, you know what? That doesn't, you know, the distinction doesn't mean anything if, you know, you're beating me up anyway. Okay, so Vance is Catholic now, although, as per his unifying mandate. See, we were talking earlier about how, you know, he's. He's to bring all of these people together. That's going to involve him downplaying or muting a bunch of aspects of his Catholicism. So you're never going to hear him talk about the Virgin Mary. You're not going to see any crucifixes around him. You're not going to see him, like, praying before the real presence or the monstrance. There's no real talk of sacramental theology. He receives Mass privately in his home most of the time. He's got this scene where the kids are bringing pillows of the can, kneel on and so on. He quotes King James, which isn't standard in the Catholic Church. He keeps his Catholicism on the DL. So how is it useful to him? Well, I think he can appeal, maybe even internally, to the pomp, the magisterium, the hierarchy, all of the ways in which the Catholic Church provides a structural blueprint for an authoritarian regime. But I see, I think as the hymns rise over Donald Trump's deathbed, Vance is also grabbing onto something paradoxical in his quest to humanize or put a human face on the MAGA 2.0 agenda. And this brings me back to how he writes about the women in his life. So Section one I opened with his description of Usha's emotional label labor. Now I want to underline his reliance on Mama for All things material and spiritual. So when he's a kid, Mamaw is his emotional rock and his savior, who protects him from his mother's substance trauma, who provides his soul care during high school. And in Hillbilly Elegy, he mentions Mamaw 400 times. Now it's down to 68 times in communion. But her spirit is everywhere. And so much so that between Mamaw and Usha, he can't ignore the value of their labor or that it's unpaid. And he even goes so far as to argue that caregiving is economically inefficient but essential for human flourishing. He talks about the dignity of labor being obscured by metrics like the gdp. Wow. And in parts of his book, he actually sounds progressive. He. He's talking about family wages and subsidiarity and things like that. But as I mentioned, it doesn't really lead him into any ideas like paying for caregiving labor or class analysis or realizing that women really do have to have control over their bodies for any of this to work. It leads him to the analysis that Catholics have been using for a century to avoid coming to those conclusions. And they've done it while carving out this kind of progressivism called Catholic social teaching. And you know, as I've mentioned in several recent episodes, this is launched in the 1890s by Pope Leo XIII in an encyclical called Rerum Novarum in which he gives this anti Marxist answer to the obvious crisis of capitalism. And he does so under pressure because the Church has to do something thing. For centuries, it's aided and abetted inequality, colonialism and slavery, and working people are waking up to it as socialism and its themes roll across Europe. And so I'm not saying that, you know, Leo XIII is disingenuous or the reforms inspired by Rerum Novarum aren't meaningful, but I think it's important to understand that their function depends on good conscience. Right. Like they are appeals to, you know, Catholics to. And this isn't going to work on somebody like Vance. You know, good conscience has never been enough to challenge the momentum of industrial capitalism. So Catholic social teaching uses the time, the vocabulary of its day. It uses the terminology of socialism, of Marxism against itself because it acknowledges this tension between capital and labor. But it pretends the struggle can be managed through goodwill and moral restraint, and also by pretending things like communism means no more personal belongings, which it doesn't. So Rerum Novarum is actually an early red scare document in progressive clothing.
- [74:59]
Julian Walker
Well, it does seem like that the Church or religious institutions in general did turn out to have some pretty good reasons to actually be scared, given what unfolded during the Bolshevik Bolshevik Revolution when clergy were either killed or stripped of their civil rights. So I guess I have a question for you. Like in 1891's Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo critiques Industrial Revolution era laissez faire capitalism. He advocates for the rights of the worker, but he also argues for property rights and critiques the massive centralization of state power that seems to be required by communism as potentially damaging the rights of those workers. So in terms of how all of that ended up playing out, do you think some of his warnings were prescient? And what are some of the things that you think he got wrong?
- [75:51]
Matthew Rimsky
I think that you're right that all church elites, but this is like all capitalists everywhere in Europe are scared of communism for good reason, because their own power is being challenged.
- [76:03]
Julian Walker
Well, they're also scared as they watch people getting killed.
- [76:06]
Matthew Rimsky
Yes, well, let me get to that. I mean, you mentioned the bolsheviks. He's writing 26 years before for them. There's no significant Catholic Church in Russia at that time. I mean, he might have been, if he was alive, he might have cared for the Orthodox, but if he had cared about it, he might have anticipated Russian Orthodox clergy being killed, but maybe not the reasons why. Because the main reason that they were killed is that the dominant Orthodox hierarchy had stood with the Duma majority in encouragement of Russia's First World War campaign. By 1917, that had killed about 2 million working class peasant Russians at the front. And the Bolsheviks were the only party that opposed the war, calling it an imperial meat grinder for the working class on both sides. And opposing that war is a huge part of how they gained the support of the workers for the revolution itself. Like, I don't. There's no withdrawal without them standing against that war, which the clergy were all in favor of. There's no revolution. So, yeah, when the dust cleared, you're right that they confiscate church property, they initiate this escalating arc that lasts for decades of suppressing or killing the clerics who had given their blessing to send millions to their deaths or who were still perceived to be loyal to that
- [77:32]
Julian Walker
cause and loyal to the monarchy. Right?
- [77:36]
Matthew Rimsky
Yes. Right. Yeah. Your main question is about the function of Catholic social teaching. And you're right that he criticizes laissez faire capitalism, but the context in which he does this is to present the contradiction between capital and labor as being real, but to convince his readers that the conflict between them could be resolved through prayer and ethics. So I personally see that as a liberal pressure valve on classical conflict, you know, built on a few principles that kind of amount to spiritual bypassing. So the most important passage from the document on this is he actually says it is a mistake. Like, this is amazing. From even like a biological perspective, this is a mistake to think that class is naturally hostile to class and that the wealthy and the working man are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth.
- [78:37]
Julian Walker
Well, that's very declarative.
- [78:40]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, he's using natural law to suggest that wealthy and non wealthy are sort of organic or natural categories and that they're not intended to live in conflict. Like what the. What the hell are you talking about? And then he says that's irrational. All. It's incredible to me anyway. So what does he say about socialism harming property rights? Because this is a very important thing that you bring up as well. He speaks about the ideal of the small landholder, which somehow we're all meant to return to unharassed by larger landowners. Right. So the quotes are if he lives sparingly, saves money, and for greater security invests his savings in land, the land in the such case is only his wages under another form. And consequently a working man's little estate thus purchased should be as completely at his full disposal as are the wages he receives for his labor. Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages and thereby of all hope and opportunity of increasing his stock and bettering his condition in life. So there's a defense of the worker's right to own the wages he's saved
- [80:00]
Julian Walker
fair, and the property he buys, and
- [80:02]
Matthew Rimsky
to get himself 40 acres and a mule, which is implausible. Right. But then he uses that reasoning to declare that private property is categorically inviolable. But the problem is that the logic also protects the factory owner's property. Right. So there isn't an attack, there isn't really a categorization that distinguishes the small landowner from the large wealth holder. And that vagueness means that you can change the goalposts, you can just move things around whenever you want. Right. And so what it amounts to is that Rerum Navarre is asking capitalists to be nicer capitalists.
- [80:39]
Julian Walker
Yeah. And perhaps laying the foundations for certain things like the five day work week and the right to unionize and those sorts of things. Yeah.
- [80:51]
Matthew Rimsky
And Catholic social movements are behind all of those things and very, very active and yeah, so there were some really good results.
- [80:58]
Julian Walker
Yeah, they made a big difference in people's lives for sure.
- [81:00]
Matthew Rimsky
Huge, huge difference. Huge difference. But through class conflict. Not because people like pray, not because people like, you know, went to church together or realized that they had more in common with their bosses than they figured out than they knew before.
- [81:13]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [81:14]
Matthew Rimsky
So last thing that I want to talk about is that, is that the other thing that's going on, and I'm doing a bonus on this, this coming Monday day, is that at the same time that Leo XIII is implementing Catholic social teaching, major journals, and I think this ties into Vance and I think it ties into some of the work we've done on, you know, maga, Christians becoming anti Semitic. Actually even major journals coming out of the Vatican, this is in the 1890s, were also propagandizing against the laissez faire capitalists who were fucking everything up. And who do you imagine, imagine they were? Oh dear, they named the Jews. So there was an intense, like there's actually there's. On one side of Leo XIII's output there's this Catholic social teaching. On the other side there is a tidal wave of anti Semitic propaganda that's actually laying the groundwork for the embedding of antisemitism into nationalistic movements that are going to arise through the next 30 years. It's a very weird kind contradiction.
- [82:23]
Julian Walker
This is behind the pogroms that are coming.
- [82:25]
Matthew Rimsky
Yes, exactly right. And it starts to explain like why, you know, Austria is almost 90% Catholic. Why do they play such a huge role? Is it, you know, why is Poland so ready to collaborate in genocide against the Jews? Why? How does Hitler born Catholic develop these views? Like they didn't emerge out of nowhere, you know, it's not, and it's not just, just old blood libel stuff from the Middle Ages. There's this huge push in the 1890s to identify the excesses of capitalism with bad Jewishness, but also at the same time to protect the order against Jewish socialists. So they're on both sides of the coin. So the most black pilled interpretation of this that I have from a Marxist perspective is that the function of, of Catholic social teaching in the interwar period is that it provides a moral as opposed to a structural response to injustice while fueling the antisemitism that became a core feature of Axis fascism. So in my bonus I'll be talking about how when your Analysis of capitalism is moral rather than structural. You can't avoid. But to create scapegoats who are immoral, to explain why bad things happen. Like. Like you can't. You have to have some reason for things going wrong. And it's very easy to find people. So that whole history speaks to how radical then, you know, these moments of liberation theology have actually been in the 1970s, when it erupted in the Global south, because it expressed this potential to really challenge the structure of capitalism and not just its manners, its bad manners. And of course, it was suppressed by Rome, but of the. And we're seeing flickers of it in the margins of Francis and Leo's writing. Okay, so questions I'm left with are, is Vance going to be disciplined by Pope Leo? I don't think so. Is he going to defy Pope Leo? Not exactly. In Reading Communion, what I've come to is that the plan seems to be to absorb and neutralize Pope Leo by pretending to care about Catholic social teaching, which, because, you know, it's a liberal framework, is. Is vulnerable to the bad faith of fascists. So that's Communion.
- [84:56]
Julian Walker
Julian, thank you so much.
- [85:17]
Matthew Rimsky
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- [85:48]
Julian Walker
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- [86:12]
Matthew Rimsky
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